(Hillary Declared in Charge Before Convention - Bigger Wars Coming?) Bernie Won CA! (Whither Brexit?) Lotsa Controversy (Silencing USA As It Goes to War)

Our real war president is taking the reins.

Or is that reigns?

I used to think I'd love to see a woman in charge of military decisions.

Especially a woman who values and has worked hard to improve the lives of vulnerable people:   children, women, the handicapped, the jobless or half-jobless, the elderly . . . .

People who have never caught up from the financial scams that began in the 80's and continue through to today.

But . . . wait.

DNC Drops “Democratic” Mask, As Hillary Takes It Over, Openly. (This Is Not a Joke.)

DNC Comes Out of Closet– Goes Public, Handing Reins Over to Clinton Campaign

By Rob Kall

The DNC has allowed Hillary Clinton to replace Debbie Wasserman Schultz as the practical head of the DNC with someone of her choosing, finally coming out of closet, showing their collusion openly.

CNN reports with the headline,Clinton campaign takes control of DNC.

They go on to inform us,

“Hillary Clinton’s campaign is taking the reins of the Democratic National Committee, installing a new top official on Thursday to oversee the party’s day-to-day operations through the general election.

Brandon Davis, national political director for the Service Employees International Union, will become the general election chief of staff for the Democratic Party. His selection formalizes the coordination of the Clinton campaign and the committee, a stark contrast to Donald Trump who is currently at odds with his party.”

Hillary supporters think this is wonderful and natural. I see it differently. It is grotesquely premature. The election is not over. The primary is not finished. What the DNC and Clinton, together, have done is to take the collusion that has been going on for over a year, probably far longer, but at least that long, as this article informs us, Guccifer Leaked Emails Show DNC Colluded, and takes it out of the closet.

Out of the closet. The DNC has been aiding and colluding with the Clinton campaign, coordinating with the mainstream media. Any Bernie Sanders supporter has seen and opined the reality. It was not subtle. But this move is the worst kind of offensive audacity.

Of course, this is all a part of the massive fraudulent tapestry the mainstream media wove, that I described in my article, MSM Sycophants Coronate The Pretender with a Massive PR Campaign.

Hillary supporters are celebrating the marginalization of Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Howard Dean says, CNN reports,

“This is in fact what happens,” Howard Dean, former Democratic Party chairman, told CNN. “Debbie will still have the title, but somebody else will be the effective operator of the DNC. It’s Hillary’s pick.”

No it’s not. This is an outrageous manifestation of the attitude and unethical, rule-breaking relationship between the DNC and the Clinton campaign that has been in existence all along. The primary election is not over, not until the convention, regardless of how strong a PR campaign the Clintons and their mainstream media surrogates have put on.

This shows how broken the Democratic party is, how broken the two party system is. More than ever we need Bernie’s revolution.

Read More:

Orwell Rolls In His Grave, featuring MCM – Buy the DVD

News From Underground is a daily e-news service run by Mark Crispin Miller, a Professor of Culture and Communication at NYU. It is based on his belief that academics, like reporters, have a civic obligation to help keep the people well-informed, so that American democracy might finally work.

I've read that we can be particularly proud as Hillary's one Democrat who appeals to almost everyone, including the Republicans who've been unafraid to attack the rest of the world militarily for the last 15 years - see, I'm not counting the Clinton year(!). She's even supporting the wives of these Republicans as members of her Cabinet and heads of departments.

I'm just loving me some women's lib right about now.

And not getting that particularly hot seat in Hell. (h/t below)

How Bernie Won California:  The Official Un-count

by Greg Palast with Dennis J Bernstein for Nation of Change

This week on The Best Democracy Money Can Buy:  The Election Crimes Bulletin we revisit the California primary crime scene and attempt to count the votes — something election officials in the state have failed to do. Officially, there are nearly 2 million votes that remain uncounted, and statistics show that the vast majority of these are favoring Bernie. If all votes were created equal and actually tallied, the Golden State would most likely be in Bernie’s pocked. Professional vote sleuth Greg Palast breaks down the numbers with Dennis J. Bernstein…

After Brexit, European Left Calls for ‘Massive Political Opposition’

What Europe needs more than ever to avoid a slide into a xenophobic, deflationary, 1930s-like abyss.

How Germany Reconquered Europe

The euro and its discontents

By James K. Galbraith, Ulrike Guérot, John Gray, Christiane Lemke, Jeff Madrick, Emmanuel Todd

The Brexit is represented differently by almost everyone involved.

Funny how a good thing becomes a bad thing when you change your perspective.

Or the facts.

The Brexit Vote

By Paul Craig Roberts

June 24, 2016

What does it mean?

Hopefully, a breakup of the EU and NATO and, thereby, the avoidance of World War III.

The EU and NATO are evil institutions. These two institutions are mechanisms created by Washington in order to destroy the sovereignty of European peoples. These two institutions give Washington control over the Western world and serve both as cover and enabler of Washington’s aggression. Without the EU and NATO, Washington could not force Europe and the UK into conflict with Russia, and Washington could not have destroyed seven Muslim countries in 15 years without being isolated as a hated war criminal government, no member of whom could have travelled abroad without being arrested and put on trial.

Clearly, the presstitute media lied about the polls in order to discourage the leave vote. But it did not work. The British people have always been the font of liberty. It was the the historic achievements of the British that transformed law into a shield of the people from a weapon in the hands of the state and gave accountable government to the world. The British, or a majority of them, understood that the EU is a dictatorial governing mechanism in which power is in the hands of unaccountable people and in which law can easily be used as a weapon in the hands of unaccountable government.

Washington, in an effort to save its power over Europe, launched a campaign, willingly joined by presstitutes and the brainwashed left-wing, who flocked to the One Percent’s banner, that presented the effort to preserve British liberty and sovereignty as racism. This dishonest campaign shows beyond all doubt that Washington and its media whores have no regard whatsoever for liberty and the sovereignty of peoples. Washington regards every assertion of democratic rule as a barrier to its hegemony and demonizes every democratic impulse. Reformist leaders in Latin America are constantly overthrown by Washington, and Washington asserts that only Washington and its terrorist allies have the right to choose the government of Syria, just as Washington chose the government of Ukraine.

The British people, or a majority of them, gave Washington the bird. But the fight is not over. Perhaps it hasn’t really yet begun. Here is what the British can likely expect: The Federal Reserve, European Central Bank, Bank of Japan, and George Soros will conspire to attack the British pound, driving it down and terrorizing the British economy. We will see who is the strongest: the will of the British people or the will of the CIA, the One Percent, and the EU and neocon nazis.

The coming attack on the British economy is the reason that leave supporters such as Boris Johnson are mistaken in their belief that there is “no need for haste” in exiting the EU. The longer it takes for the British to escape from the authoritarian EU, the longer Washington and the EU can inflict punishment on the British people for voting to leave and the more time the presstitutes will have to convince the British people that their vote was a mistake. As the vote is nonbinding, a cowardly and cowed Parliament could reject the vote.

Cameron should step down immediately, not months from now in October. The new British government should tell the EU that the British people’s decision is implemented now, not in two years and that all political and legal relationships terminated as of the vote. Otherwise, in two years the British will be so beat down by punishments and propaganda that their vote will be overturned.

The British government should immediately announce the termination of its participation in Washington’s sanctions on Russia and hook its economy to the rising nations of Russia, China, India, and Iran. With this support, the British can survive the Washington led attack on their economy.

Despite the Vote, the Odds Are Against Britain Leaving the EU

By Paul Craig Roberts

The Brexit vote shows that a majority of the British voters understand that the UK government represents interests other than the interests of the British people. As difficult as the British know it is to hold their own government to account, they understand they have no prospect whatsoever of holding the EU government to account. During their time under the EU, the British have been reminded of historical times when law was the word of the sovereign.

The propagandists who comprise the Western political and media establishments succeeded in keeping the real issues out of public discussion and presenting the leave vote as racism. However, enough of the British people resisted the brainwashing and controlled debate to grasp the real issues: sovereignty, accountable government, financial independence, freedom from involvement in Washington’s wars and conflict with Russia.

The British people should not be so naive as to think that their vote settles the matter. The fight has only begun. Expect:

— The British government to come back to the people and say, look, the EU has given us a better deal. We can now afford to stay in.
— The Fed, ECB, BOJ, and NY hedge funds to pound the pound and to short British stocks in order to convince the British voters that their vote is sinking the economy.
— More emphasis on the vote’s weakening of Europe, leaving all to the mercy of “Russian aggression.”
— Hard to resist bribes (and threats) to prominent members of the leave majority and pressure on such leave leaders as Boris Johnson to be reasonable, concillatory and to maintain good relations with Washington and Europe, and to reach a compromise on remaining in the EU.
— Expect the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) to attribute the loss of British jobs and investment opportunities to the leave vote.

Once you learn to think about how things really are and not as the presstitutes present them,
you will be able to add to the list all by yourself.

Remember, the Irish voted against the EU and pressure was kept on them until they reversed their vote. This is the likely fate of the British.

(Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts' latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West, How America Was Lost, The Neoconservative Threat to World Order.)

More on Brexit

June 24, 2016

Paul Craig Roberts

Information continues to come in about the Brexit vote. A member of the British Army said that 90% of the lads in his unit voted to leave. They voted exit because they do not believe they should be involved in Washingtons wars. He said that his unit agreed that the wars are dictated by Washington, via Brussels, and not by the British people. He also said that that the soldiers were “taking their own pen” to the ballot box, because “they only use pencils at the polls and they could be rubbed out and changed.”

Richie Allen in London, a radio presenter in Manchester, England, said that as an Irishman he remembers how the Irish vote against the EU was overturned when the people rejected the Lisbon Treaty and that already in England “they’ve begun talking about the possibility that the EU will come back with a better offer.” In other words, the exit vote is not being treated as meaningful. See his guest column here: http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2016/06/24/the-campaign-to-undermind-the-vote-guest-column-by-richie-allen/

And as Stephen Lendman reports, the propaganda is already in high gear with David Cameron setting the tone by emphasizing how happy the vote has surely made Putin and ISIS (somehow these two deadly enemies are happy over the same thing!). The self-hating Russian, Garry Kasparov, said Brexit was “the perfect gift for Vladimir Putin,” as Britain’s exit leaves the EU a “weakened institution with less power to confront Putin’s assaults on Europe’s borders.” What assaults, Garry?

Former US ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul is “shocked, shocked!” The US and EU lost, Putin wins.
Of course, the vote had nothing to do with Putin or Russia. But the liars are going to try to make the British feel that they betrayed England and gave Russia power over Europe. Russian spokesman Dmitry Peskov replied to the nonsense:  We are accustomed to “the Russian factor” as the explanation of all events in the universe.

The British people might think that they are out of the EU, but they are not. They have a long hard fight ahead. Washington and the British political and media establishments that serve Washington are not going to let them leave.

Brexit implications. . . .

June 24, 2016

Watching England vote to leave the European Union is a strange experience. It is one of those events which leave you dazed and confused but which may, a few years from now, prove to have huge implications of the future of Europe and the world in general.

Brexit will have a significant impact on the lives of many British people who have chosen to make their homes on Continental Europe. If those who have decided to work or retire in other countries, like Spain or Germany, don't want to go back to Britain they will have to seek naturalization in their chosen nations. This may or not be a possibility, only time will tell.

But beyond the significant ways in which individual lives will obviously be impacted, the exit of Britain will also have bigger, more ominous, effects. This morning the Scots are already talking about another independence referendum because they voted overwhelmingly to stay in the EU. There are also huge implications for Northern Ireland. The peace in NI was maintained in part because the EU allowed for an open boarder between it and the Republic of Ireland. The reintroduction of a hard border could easily reignite tensions and fighting in Northern Ireland, particularly given that they were another region that voted to remain in the EU.

Another important issue to consider is that Brexit could spell the doom of the EU in general. The victory of those who have pushed for Britain to leave the EU will galvanize those in other countries who want to leave the Union. The EU is, at the moment, even less popular in France than it is in England, a rather ominous fact. The failure of the EU could have terrible implications for the peace and stability of Europe in general.

But one of the things that the vote yesterday reminded me of was the generational political split that we see happening in many places, North America included. The young people in Britain voted overwhelmingly to stay in the EU. Young people everywhere seem to understand and embrace the need for greater cooperation, more regulation to control markets, and more open human and cultural integration. I have personally seen this generational split in people around me and it is noticeable and pronounced. In the US we have seen the amazing way that Bernie Sanders has brought young people into the political process, and this is good news for the future. But generational change can be a messy and disorienting business, and I can't help but think that the future of England and Europe in general looks rocky as an older generation, still steeped in an age of racism and Neo-Liberalism, seeks to hold on to its myths and power while a new generation comes up to redefine politics.

The split in American politics is as pronounced as that demonstrated by the Brexit vote. Old white folks have demonstrated a shocking degree of support for messages of division, racial hatred, and misogynistic rhetoric. Politicians like Trump use those simmering feelings to bolster a rightwing populism that talks about a return to the "good old days." But younger, more culturally dynamic people know that much of the "good old days" were terrible and they are looking for a way forward that embraces some of the post war drive for greater equality and cooperation without the racism, xenophobia, homophobia, and gender inequality.

The Brexit marks a moment in the battle for a new way forward. The battle was lost, but the fight will not go away because the ideas of those who voted to leave the EU are inexorably being replaced. The battle is slow but it's not going away.

Posted by Kirby Evans

_ _ _ _ _ _ _

Silencing America As It Prepares for War

Returning to the United States in an election year, I am struck by the silence. I have covered four presidential campaigns, starting with 1968; I was with Robert Kennedy when he was shot and I saw his assassin, preparing to kill him. It was a baptism in the American way, along with the salivating violence of the Chicago police at the Democratic Party's rigged convention. The great counter revolution had begun.

The first to be assassinated that year, Martin Luther King, had dared link the suffering of African-Americans and the people of Vietnam. When Janis Joplin sang, "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose", she spoke perhaps unconsciously for millions of America's victims in faraway places.

"We lost 58,000 young soldiers in Vietnam, and they died defending your freedom. Now don't you forget it."  So said a National Parks Service guide as I filmed last week at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. He was addressing a school party of young teenagers in bright orange T-shirts. As if by rote, he inverted the truth about Vietnam into an unchallenged lie.

The millions of Vietnamese who died and were maimed and poisoned and dispossessed by the American invasion have no historical place in young minds, not to mention the estimated 60,000 veterans who took their own lives. A friend of mine, a marine who became a paraplegic in Vietnam, was often asked, "Which side did you fight on?"

A few years ago, I attended a popular exhibition called "The Price of Freedom" at the venerable Smithsonian Institution in Washington. The lines of ordinary people, mostly children shuffling through a Santa's grotto of revisionism, were dispensed a variety of lies:  the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved "a million lives"; Iraq was "liberated [by] air strikes of unprecedented precision". The theme was unerringly heroic: only Americans pay the price of freedom.

The 2016 election campaign is remarkable not only for the rise of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders but also for the resilience of an enduring silence about a murderous self-bestowed divinity. A third of the members of the United Nations have felt Washington's boot, overturning governments, subverting democracy, imposing blockades and boycotts. Most of the presidents responsible have been liberal - Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Obama.

The breathtaking record of perfidy is so mutated in the public mind, wrote the late Harold Pinter, that it "never happened ...Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest. It didn't matter... ". Pinter expressed a mock admiration for what he called "a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis."

Take Obama. As he prepares to leave office, the fawning has begun all over again. He is "cool". One of the more violent presidents, Obama gave full reign to the Pentagon war-making apparatus of his discredited predecessor. He prosecuted more whistleblowers - truth-tellers - than any president. He pronounced Chelsea Manning guilty before she was tried. Today, Obama runs an unprecedented worldwide campaign of terrorism and murder by drone.

In 2009, Obama promised to help "rid the world of nuclear weapons" and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. No American president has built more nuclear warheads than Obama. He is "modernising" America's doomsday arsenal, including a new "mini" nuclear weapon, whose size and "smart" technology, says a leading general, ensure its use is "no longer unthinkable".

James Bradley, the best-selling author of Flags of Our Fathers and son of one of the US marines who raised the flag on Iwo Jima, said, "[One] great myth we're seeing play out is that of Obama as some kind of peaceful guy who's trying to get rid of nuclear weapons. He's the biggest nuclear warrior there is. He's committed us to a ruinous course of spending a trillion dollars on more nuclear weapons. Somehow, people live in this fantasy that because he gives vague news conferences and speeches and feel-good photo-ops that somehow that's attached to actual policy. It isn't."

On Obama's watch, a second cold war is under way. The Russian president is a pantomime villain; the Chinese are not yet back to their sinister pig-tailed caricature - when all Chinese were banned from the United States - but the media warriors are working on it.

Neither Hillary Clinton nor Bernie Sanders has mentioned any of this. There is no risk and no danger for the United States and all of us; for them, the greatest military build-up on the borders of Russia since World War Two has not happened. On May 11, Romania went "live" with a Nato "missile defence" base that aims its first-strike American missiles at the heart of Russia, the world's second nuclear power.

In Asia, the Pentagon is sending ships, planes and special forces to the Philippines to threaten China. The US already encircles China with hundreds of military bases that curve in an arc up from Australia, to Asia and across to Afghanistan. Obama calls this a "pivot".

As a direct consequence, China reportedly has changed its nuclear weapons policy from no-first-use to high alert and put to sea submarines with nuclear weapons. The escalator is quickening.

It was Hillary Clinton who, as Secretary of State in 2010, elevated the competing territorial claims for rocks and reef in the South China Sea to an international issue; CNN and BBC hysteria followed; China was building airstrips on the disputed islands. In a mammoth war game in 2015, Operation Talisman Sabre, the US and Australia practiced "choking" the Straits of Malacca through which pass most of China's oil and trade. This was not news.

Clinton declared that America had a "national interest" in these Asian waters. The Philippines and Vietnam were encouraged and bribed to pursue their claims and old enmities against China. In America, people are being primed to see any Chinese defensive position as offensive, and so the ground is laid for rapid escalation. A similar strategy of provocation and propaganda is applied to Russia.

Clinton, the "women's candidate", leaves a trail of bloody coups: in Honduras, in Libya (plus the murder of the Libyan president) and Ukraine. The latter is now a CIA theme park swarming with Nazis and the frontline of a beckoning war with Russia. It was through Ukraine - literally, borderland - that Hitler's Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, which lost 27 million people. This epic catastrophe remains a presence in Russia. Clinton's presidential campaign has received money from all but one of the world's ten biggest arms companies. No other candidate comes close.

Sanders, the hope of many young Americans, is not very different from Clinton in his proprietorial view of the world beyond the United States. He backed Bill Clinton's illegal bombing of Serbia. He supports Obama's terrorism by drone, the provocation of Russia and the return of special forces (death squads) to Iraq. He has nothing to say on the drumbeat of threats to China and the accelerating risk of nuclear war. He agrees that Edward Snowden should stand trial and he calls Hugo Chavez - like him, a social democrat - "a dead communist dictator". He promises to support Clinton if she is nominated.

The election of Trump or Clinton is the old illusion of choice that is no choice: two sides of the same coin. In scapegoating minorities and promising to "make America great again", Trump is a far right-wing domestic populist; yet the danger of Clinton may be more lethal for the world.

"Only Donald Trump has said anything meaningful and critical of US foreign policy," wrote Stephen Cohen, emeritus professor of Russian History at Princeton and NYU, one of the few Russia experts in the United States to speak out about the risk of war.

In a radio broadcast, Cohen referred to critical questions Trump alone had raised. Among them: why is the United States "everywhere on the globe"? What is NATO's true mission? Why does the US always pursue regime change in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Ukraine? Why does Washington treat Russia and Vladimir Putin as an enemy?

The hysteria in the liberal media over Trump serves an illusion of "free and open debate" and "democracy at work". His views on immigrants and Muslims are grotesque, yet the deporter-in-chief of vulnerable people from America is not Trump but Obama, whose betrayal of people of colour is his legacy: such as the warehousing of a mostly black prison population, now more numerous than Stalin's gulag.

This presidential campaign may not be about populism but American liberalism, an ideology that sees itself as modern and therefore superior and the one true way. Those on its right wing bear a likeness to 19th century Christian imperialists, with a God-given duty to convert or co-opt or conquer.

In Britain, this is Blairism. The Christian war criminal Tony Blair got away with his secret preparation for the invasion of Iraq largely because the liberal political class and media fell for his "cool Britannia". In the Guardian, the applause was deafening; he was called "mystical". A distraction known as identity politics, imported from the United States, rested easily in his care.

History was declared over, class was abolished and gender promoted as feminism; lots of women became New Labour MPs. They voted on the first day of Parliament to cut the benefits of single parents, mostly women, as instructed. A majority voted for an invasion that produced 700,000 Iraqi widows.

The equivalent in the US are the politically correct warmongers on the New York Times, the Washington Post and network TV who dominate political debate. I watched a furious debate on CNN about Trump's infidelities. It was clear, they said, a man like that could not be trusted in the White House. No issues were raised. Nothing on the 80 per cent of Americans whose income has collapsed to 1970s levels. Nothing on the drift to war. The received wisdom seems to be "hold your nose" and vote for Clinton: anyone but Trump. That way, you stop the monster and preserve a system gagging for another war.

Follow John Pilger on twitter @johnpilger

John Pilger, the insider who came outside to wage the good fight against the CIA economic wars.

A real brave man.

Some might say foolhardy when noting the opposition.